Explore new capabilities in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 and 8.10 beta releases

It’s no surprise that today’s IT environments are more complex than ever before. A mix of old and new technologies, disparate teams and outdated manual processes often result in inefficient operations, security and compliance risks and overburdened IT teams.

Standardizing on a single operating system throughout your organization is the first step in simplifying and streamlining your IT infrastructure. Standardized operating environments (SOEs) can help you overcome IT complexity to improve efficiency, reduce costs, increase uptime and improve your security posture. IT teams can make the most of their skills and expertise and have more time to spend on more rewarding and innovative projects.

That’s where Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) comes in. Standardizing on RHEL gives you a more reliable foundation for your hybrid cloud environments. You can run applications and workloads where they make the most sense and easily move them when requirements or demands change. RHEL also provides a more stable, consistent platform to help streamline operations and provide an enhanced security posture at scale.

With new features and capabilities in the RHEL 9.4 and 8.10 beta releases, we continue to help you simplify and speed your IT operations.

Enhance security and compliance

Safeguarding sensitive data, protecting against cyber threats and adhering to regulatory requirements are essential tasks. Enhancements in RHEL help you improve the security of your IT environment and maintain the trust of your most important stakeholders.

As a component of the zero trust architecture (ZTA) security model, passkey authentication in RHEL allows for passwordless and multifactor authentication (MFA) with FIDO2 (Fast IDentity Online 2) compliant passkeys for centrally managed users.* You can also configure WireGuard—a high-performance virtual private network (VPN) solution that runs in the Linux kernel—via the RHEL web console to further improve system security.*

RHEL system roles help you automate management tasks to improve consistency and better protect your critical applications and workloads. The fapolicyd system role automatically deploys and configures fapolicyd to allow or deny application executions at scale. With the Microsoft SQL Server system role, you can automatically install, configure and run Microsoft SQL Server 2022 as a confined application using SELinux to help protect sensitive data.*

Improve availability and reliability

High availability and reliability help provide uninterrupted access to services, maintain data integrity and deliver exceptional user experiences. New features in RHEL streamline recovery operations across hybrid cloud environments.

Enhanced external virtual machine snapshot capabilities in the web console—including support for live snapshots—simplify and standardize virtual machine operations.* The new snapshot system role lets you create and manage point-in-time snapshots of logical volume manager (LVM) storage volumes for faster, more predictable and more repeatable data backup and recovery at scale.

The high availability clustering system role lets you configure quorum device (qdevice) options and fencing topologies for additional flexibility when systems become unresponsive.

With new capabilities in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability Add-On, you can automatically detect SAP HANA index server failures and switch to secondary nodes, shortening recovery times and increasing data availability.

Simplify edge system management

Edge devices move computing capabilities closer to the end user for more efficient data processing and improved latency and scalability. New options in the web console help you manage RHEL systems at the edge. You can pin rpm-ostree deployments, reset current deployments and perform clean-up tasks from a single location.*

Most system roles also now let you automate and manage RHEL systems at the edge. For example, you can automate Podman configuration—using the Podman system role—to deploy production-ready container workloads across rpm-ostree systems.

Additionally, with the included image builder tool, you can create and deploy edge device images that use certified cryptographic modules in compliance with Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 140-2.

Increase consistency across complex environments

Consistent, repeatable operations can simplify both management and troubleshooting tasks. With new capabilities in RHEL, you can automate more operations to increase consistency across complex IT environments.

• Through the web console, you can automate kernel crash dump (kdump) configurations
• The ad_integration system role lets you configure dynamic domain name system (DNS) updates on RHEL hosts integrated with Microsoft Active Directory
• With the bootloader system role, you can automate configuration of kernel command line parameters—along with timeout and passwords—in the bootloader to improve system management at scale

Build and deploy applications rapidly

Developers need access to the latest features, fixes and improvements for the tools they rely on most. Application Streams lets you update a selection of technologies in RHEL separately from the core operating system, helping you build applications faster and with less hassle. New Applications Streams in RHEL 9.4 and 8.10 betas include:

• Python 3.12. New optimizations and features include more flexible f-string parsing, a new application programming interface (API) for debugging and profiling and support for isolated subinterpreters and the Linux performance profiler in traces
• PostgreSQL 16. Added features and enhancements include parallel hash join, logical replication from standby servers, large transactions in parallel, improved statistics monitoring and new SQL/JSON constructors and identity functions
• Ruby 3.3. Enhancements include the new Prism parser and a pure-Ruby, just-in-time (JIT) compiler, along with multiple performance improvements
• MariaDB 10.11. Updates include new server and administrator authentication features and replication improvements*
• Compiler toolkits. New versions include LLVM 17, Rust 1.75 and Go 1.21

Delivering exceptional user experiences requires more than just great applications—you also need a deployment environment optimized for performance, scalability and reliability. Included with RHEL, new features in Podman 4.9 simplify management and increase resilience of your container environment.

The multi-arch build farm feature lets you dispatch builds to Podman hosts on different platforms, easing multiarchitecture container builds. You can also combine multiple command line options in a single, reusable module to simplify management of complex sets of flags.

With Heredoc syntax, you can now include short scripts and files inside Containerfiles, while the Podman REST API lets you view more detailed progress information. With SQLite as the default database for new installations, you can improve the resilience of your container environments, particularly when abnormal terminations occur.

Additional resources

Learn more about the latest features in RHEL 9.4 and 8.10 beta releases here:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 beta product download
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 beta release notes
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 beta documentation
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10 beta product download
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10 beta release notes
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10 beta documentation

* These features and capabilities are included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 beta only.